TNG- 11001001

[TheGreenMan]

Was I the only one who saw ' Half a Life' and thought we were going to get a Half Life review?

[Nightbeat74]

i always thought the binars where kinda cute and hoped they would come back at some point,maybe with lower decks they can.

[Nightbeat74]

Was I the only one who saw ' Half a Life' and thought we were going to get a Half Life review?

same when i saw it in the upcomeing box,then i reread it and remembered that one tng ep , he is doing fallout later on in December tho.

[Link8909]

Lore is a great character. One of the problems might have been the fact that evil twins were old hat even back then. It is quite hard to write fresh ideas for them. ''Brothers'' was one of them as it introduced the emotion chip which would become important later on.

Another thing that made Lore interesting and stood out from other evil twins was his motivation, him being resented by the Omicron Theta colonists for being "too perfect", and rather than Dr. Soong working to fix his emotional instability, instead opted to create Data to basically replace him, Lore's "You could have just fix me!" from "Brothers" was a really powerful line.

[CrypticMirror]

This is one of those episodes that are just meh for me. It isn't bad, but I would have classed this as a five. It is a typical TNG episode, it is just sort of there. I'm not really invested in Riker's libido, which this episode seems to think I ought to be, I'd rather that there had been some sort of more action oriented solution to the Binar's sun problem. At least left the autodestruct running while Picard, Riker, and maybe even Geordi and Worf run around throwing levers as the computer shouts out a tense countdown. Admittedly that would make it a typical TOS episode, but that is just me.

[cloudkitt]

Seeing a new Star Trek TNG made me joyous. Learning it was Season one made me giddy!

There's something about how the early TNG seasons focus so much on the mundane little things and minutiae of future living that I really like... when it isn't being boring as heck.

It is nice having a story that is more than our heroes accidentally threaten the universe.

Freaking this.

[bronnt]

Every time I see that thumbnail of Minuet, I see a young Kate Mulgrew. Once I noticed the resemblence I absolutely couldn't unsee it.

[bronnt]

It'd be like the US government outsourcing their military communications systems to Huawei.

Or if the twelve colonies had their entire defense network system outsourced to one guy, who had clearance to let his Cylon lover play with the coding.

[CmdrKing]

Lore is a great character. One of the problems might have been the fact that evil twins were old hat even back then. It is quite hard to write fresh ideas for them. ''Brothers'' was one of them as it introduced the emotion chip which would become important later on.

yeah, Datalore plays it as a fairly standard evil twin, but Brothers actually gives Lore some character of his own, and that push and pull between resentment and love for his family gives him a layer that helps the conceit land. Yeah, he's an asshole, but there's a humanity to it now, and it carries forward into his later more overtly villainous appearances.

[Link8909]

I understand why people like the Bynar's but I never particularly liked them myself. Their whole culture, and yes I'm being humancentric here, seems kinda horrifying to echo some of what clearspira said. The forced "lobotomy" and forced pairing (I'm assuming its forced, doesn't exactly seem like there is alot of choice or individuality on their parts), one in their species cannot be an individual mentally or even physically and have zero choice. They are not benign Borg, they are the Borg if confined to one species though with less gimp suits.

Yeah, the Bynar's are another Star Trek species that have this cultural norm that is horrific from our moral standpoint, which seems to happen a lot, the people of Eminiar VII and Vendikar: who willingly commit suicide if they're reported as a casualty in their simulated war from "A Taste of Armageddon", the Kobali: who use cadavers to reproduce (no not like that) from "Ashes to Ashes", and as will see next review, the people of Kaelon II: who at the age of sixty commit ritual suicide from "Half a Life", just to name some off the top of my head.

While it's not stated that what the Bynar's do is a forced cultural standard like with the Ba'ul's and Kelpien's "balance", or if it's something that was necessary or what they deem as progress, the idea of them replacing apart of a newborns brain with a synaptic processor does raise some red flags like with those other cultures I mentioned, and I see how that is off-putting.

Maybe if they were naturally telepathic, with births always happening with twins that are naturally connected, with their planetary computer and data storage devices being an add on and a cultural norm that the majority of the population do.

Also on a side note, the whole "we lobotomise kids" thing was introduced in the Enterprise episode "Regeneration", with Phlox commenting on how the procedure he saw was "very impressive", just another bit of evidence of Phlox being a sociopath.